Matthew d'Ancona hits the nail on the head in his weekly column:
I am not sure the PM and his colleagues yet fully grasp how furious the public are with them – all of them. Furious with Mr Brown for dithering over the election date, for failing to explain his purpose and his trajectory, for seeming only to cling to power for its own sake. Furious with a regime that, against a backdrop of global recession, devotes its energies to planning disgusting smears against its enemies. Furious with the Labour Party itself which, yet again this weekend, is whispering of leadership plots, ultimatums, petitions, and (those now-familiar words) "Alan Johnson in Number 10 by Christmas".
Barry Sheerman, the Labour MP for Huddersfield, said on yesterday's Today programme that the PM was on probation and had "got this summer to show he's got the capability to do it". Others are muttering darkly of another yet attempted coup after the Labour Party conference in Brighton.
It's all nonsense, of course. The Brown premiership can be defined as follows: Gordon's inability to establish unchallenged leadership of his party, and his party's no less pathetic inability to get rid of him. They deserve each other, they really do. No wonder the public is so angry. And that anger will get deeper between now and polling day. Norwich North is not a little local difficulty: quite the opposite. It is a tiny portent of a much greater rising against a party closer to grand catastrophe than it truly knows.
Precisely. Labour are in denial about what happened on Thursday. By failing to understand the reality of their situation, Labour will just make the defeat much worse than it would otherwise be.
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Labour have been in denial since Gordon didn't call his election Howard.
ReplyDeleteI read somewhere last week that labour has been kept going for years by their Scots MPs, who have been backbenchers for years. When they get into power these folks get top jobs, no experience though. That's when the rot set in.
Another clobbering in Glasgow at the November by-election could well be the last nail in Brown's coffin. It is already a disgrace that those people have been left without an MP between the ousting of Gorbals and November to suit Gordoom's tactics.
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